Life, the Universe and Information Processing: public talk by dr. P. Michelucci

Dr Pietro Michelucci is the director of the Human Computation Institute (US) & founder of the EyesOnALZ citizen science project. We’ll cover the topics of information processing, human and machine computation and emerging collective human/machine systems -- afterwards we will have a discussion about doing distributed scientific research outside academia -- for instance, in hackerspaces!

More information:
Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pattern recognition to creative abstraction. With the help of computers, these cognitive abilities can be effectively combined into multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Most of today's human computation systems rely on sending bite-sized 'micro-tasks' to many individuals and then stitching together the results. For example, 165,000 volunteers in EyeWire have analyzed thousands of images online to help build the world's most complete map of human retinal neurons.

This microtasking approach alone cannot address the tough challenges we face today. A radically new approach is needed to solve "wicked problems" - those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).

New human computation technologies can help. Recent techniques provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs, where individual contributions can be processed by a computer and sent to the next person for improvement or analysis of a different kind. This enables the construction of more flexible collaborative environments that can better address the most challenging issues.

HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer's disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system.

"By enabling members of the general public to play some simple online game, we expect to reduce the time to treatment discovery from decades to just a few years", says HCI director, Dr. Pietro Michelucci. "This gives an opportunity for anyone, including the tech-savvy generation of caregivers and early stage AD patients, to take the matter into their own hands."

-- based on https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/hci-hsc121815.php